Understanding users' intention to switch personal cloud storage services: Evidence from the Chinese market

Highlights

• Push-Pull-Mooring framework of human migration is adopted.

• Perceived risk of incumbent service promotes intention to switch.

• Transfer trust towards the provider of new service promotes intention to switch.

• Favourable social norms towards the new service promotes intention to switch.

• Perceived critical mass towards the new service promotes intention to switch.

Abstract

Cloud storage services have been rapidly gaining popularity among Internet/Mobile users. Prior studies largely focused on users' early adoption of cloud storage services, continual usage of the services and users' willingness to pay. However, limited attention has been paid to switching behaviors. In the Chinese market, as services provided by different platforms become homogeneous, non-functional factors are expected to play an important role in affecting users' selection of services. Based on the push-pull-mooring framework, we propose a research model by incorporating four factors: risk, trust, switching cost and social influences (critical mass and social norm). Results from a field survey suggest that all push (risk), pull (trust, critical mass) and mooring (switching cost, social norm) factors each have direct impacts on switching intention. Mooring factors fail to moderate the impact of push factor on switching intention, but they are able to moderate the effects of pull factors on switching intention. The results yield both theoretical and practical implications.

Introduction

Cloud storage services have been rapidly gaining popularity among Internet/Mobile users, due to their advantages over traditional storage approaches. For example, cloud storage platforms usually provide a large storage quota for free (e.g., Baidu Cloud: 2TB; Dropbox: 2GB), along with high reliability. Users can upload files to the cloud when their local storage space is limited, and they do not need to worry about data loss due to obsolescence of local storage media (Burda & Teuteberg, 2015). Moreover, files stored in the cloud can be accessed in multiple ways, including web browsers, PC software clients, and mobile apps. File sharing is also convenient. Users can easily create sharing groups (in Dropbox) or send out temporary access passwords (in Baidu Cloud).

According to recent industrial statistics, in the Chinese personal cloud storage market,¹ the number of users increased from 23 million in 2011 to 380 million in 2014, and this number is expected to reach 450 million in 2015 (Iimedia, 2014). Such a huge market has attracted many enterprises to provide cloud storage services. It has been reported that there used to be more than 30 known personal cloud storage platforms in Chinese market (e.g., Baidu Cloud, Mi Cloud, Tianyi Cloud and Tencent Cloud), and the providers of these platforms range from Internet service providers to telecommunication companies (Guo, 2014).

However, despite these exciting developments, the cloud storage market is relatively nascent in China. On one hand, due to fierce competition and a lack of mature business models, the services provided in different platforms become homogeneous (Csdn, 2014). On the other hand, imperfect government interventions and unstable regulations have caused serious trust issues and risk concerns. For example, the adaptability of a platform under changes of government policies, and whether a platform can perform as a protector to secure users' personal data under the interventions from the government (Jing, 2016). Although there is no official statistic about the number of users who have exhibited switching behavior, market investigators have estimated that over 237 million cloud storage accounts are needed be switched because of a newly proposed regulations against pornography and illegal publications (Mydrivers, 2016). Another noticeable issue is network effect caused by file sharing. A user's switching behavior might motivate others to switch. For instance, when a user moves his account to another platform, his followers (e.g., people who wish to acquire shared files) may be motivated to switch accounts. Therefore, by jointly considering market scale, homogenous services, unstable policies, a large volume of switching behaviors and network effect, understanding what factors influence a Chinese user's switching choice of personal storage service is essential.

As the services become similar, it is reasonable to argue that factors, which are not related to functional differences among services, will play an important role in affecting users' choice of services. These non-functional factors, according to prior studies on cloud storage, include trust, risk and social factors (e.g., social influence) (Arpaci, 2016, Burda and Teuteberg, 2014b, Burda and Teuteberg, 2016, Yang and Lin, 2015). In this paper, we are interested in understanding how non-functional factors affect users' switching of personal online storage services. Particularly, we consider both individual and social factors, while most of the studies on online storage lean toward evaluating individual-oriented variables (e.g., privacy) (Burda and Teuteberg, 2015, Burda and Teuteberg, 2016, Goode, 2015, Stantchev et al., 2014).

Compared to prior studies on IT switching or cloud storage, this study is interesting from the following aspects. First, prior studies largely focused on users' early adoption or acceptance of cloud storage (Ambrose and Chiravuri, 2010, Burda and Teuteberg, 2016, Stantchev et al., 2014), while a few began to address users' continual usage intention (Huang, 2016, Yang and Lin, 2015), as well as users' willingness to become paid users (Yan & Wakefield, 2015). However, limited attention has been paid to users' switching behaviour. Second, risk is one of the most important factors in cloud computing. Previous studies only measured general perception of risk, while this study explores multiple dimensions of risk and tries to highlight their differences. Third, the majority of previous studies only consider the impacts of peer opinions or suggestions (social psychological aspect of social influence); our study further evaluates the economic aspect of social influence. Despite recommendations from important people or herd effect, users might be attracted by a cloud storage platform because they can enjoy a better performance/service quality caused by richer resources.